Percentages trip off the tongue of every exhibitor at this year's Shanghai motor show. A market that grew 71 per cent last year, a premium market expected to grow by 30 per cent this year, a doubling of dealers, tripling of staff, quadrupling of profit. That China is big is undisputed - it's the unknowns that are the real questions.

It's only when you get close that you really start to understand the magnitude of that growth. Merely to keep up with the market, Volvo Cars, the first wholly Chinese-owned Western car maker, will have to open a new dealership every fortnight and those dealers will need to recruit 100 new members of staff every month for the next four years.

Here in Shanghai the sheer growth of the city means a new map is required every three years. Even cab drivers don't know where they're going any more. This bustling, cosmopolitan city of 23million people has a private car population of just one million. It's small wonder that car makers are tripping over themselves to keep up with demand. In a refreshingly direct presentation, Snijders admitted that even growing at 36 per cent last year meant that Volvo had underperformed the market by almost half.

This Geely-owned Swedish car maker has an ambitious plan to sell 200,000 cars in China by 2015, about half of which will be built in a new factory at Chengdu in western China, with another site under consideration at Daqing in the north-west.

China's car market is mainly for large saloons for the moment, with stretched cars being in the majority, a lot of them to government and the civil service. "We reckon one government sale equals six more to individuals," said Snijders.

For the future, however, SUV sales are likely to overtake those of large saloons and Volvo is already selling more XC60s than it can make. "I can't get enough of them," says Snijders, "and with delivery taking six weeks the market can move on in the time it takes to get a car to a customer." Now that is a measure of the frantic Chinese market – you order a car in April and by the time you get it in mid-May fashion has already moved on...

Features of the Chinese market, according to Snijders, are youth ("Customers are on average 10 years younger than those in Europe"), a growing awareness of health and safety (partly as a consequence of China's improving but still abysmal air quality) and peculiar quirks such as a preference for sunroofs to let cigarette smoke out of the cabin – air quality only for some, it seems.

In the early stages of mass car ownership, China's car buyers tend to look for ostentatious displays of wealth, which results in some heavily blinged-up cars with chromed wheels and lots of adornment. This is not so good for Volvo, which tends to attract a more thoughtful, conservative type of customer, but several trends might be working in its favour. Snijders reckons the government has instructed its civil servants to tone down the sort of cars they are buying with an emphasis on subtlety, which might help.

There's also the speed of market changes here. "What it's taken us to do in 100 years, it's taking the Chinese 10 years," says Volvo's design boss, Peter Horbury. This might mean the Chinese start to move in Volvo's direction sooner than we think, or at least that's what the company hopes.

There are some aspects of the Chinese market that are just plain different from anywhere else, however, such as the googlies the government tends to occasionally bowl at car makers. Last November Bejing's city authorities attempted to damp down demand for new cars by reducing the amount of license plates issued from about 750 a year to just 240. Although existing car owners can transfer their plates to new cars, the limited number of new plates are issued on a lottery basis and not every one who wins will have the wherewithal to purchase a new car. "It basically means the market has been down by 40 per cent in the first three months of this year," says Snijders.

There are times when it's easy to mistake the Chinese economy for the sort of corporatist policies espoused by the Sixties Labour government in the UK. It isn't. Market forces here are controlled as much by the government as they are by Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market.

And we haven't even dealt with the environmental consequences of mass car ownership in China, which is already heavily dependent on imported oil. While the car makers plunge into China as if it were a Klondike-style gold rush, the Chinese government has espoused the leap-frogging technology of electric cars, but there isn't much evidence of them in Shanghai. A few battery scooters, maybe, but very few charging stations and a growing thirst for individual mobility means by the time electric cars are a reality, it might be too late and they'll be driving around in giant SUVs just like us. The question then is about resources.